The World's Leading Independent Agencies: VCCP

Never eat the local speciality. As free advice goes, this is one of the
best tips I have ever had. It came from a chap called Tom Rodwell, who,
as a seasoned international adman, was preparing me for an exotic
three-week trip to the Orient on behalf of All Nippon Airlines and Mazda
Cars.

On arriving in Tokyo, I almost immediately ignored his wise exhortation
and ordered something which, even at the time, I knew to be a risky
choice, judging by the look on my host's face (even though he had
strongly recommended it as a superb local delicacy).

It turned out to be an unlaid egg, still attached to the innards of the
chicken in question. The lesson was learned as quickly as it had been
ignored; local specialities are literally tripe (or faggots, or eels, or
offal, or gizzards, or innards of some description). If they were any
good, they would have taken the world by storm long ago - like sushi,
egg fried rice, Chateaubriand, creme brulee, hamburgers, pizza, pasta
and, of course, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.

The point about Rodwell's law is the breadth of its applicability. It
applies to board games (eg. chess) and sport (eg. football) and it
applies to brands.

Most of the great brand ideas are universal from the word go, even if,
like with Yorkshire pudding or sushi, it takes a while for people to
realise this.

The process is simple. Strong brands begin by being strong at home,
where they learn how to address the highest-order needs of their markets
and then, at a given point, this local template is made universal. It is
true of Coke, Rolex, Mercedes, FedEx, Guinness and Apple, and it is
becoming true of some of the newer ideas (for more information, read
on!).

These brands transcend geography because they go straight for the market
jugular (mobility, time-keeping, connection, refreshment), giving their
DNA an inherent universality.

So, at VCCP, we do not think international, we think universal. Some of
our clients are "local" (GNER, ING Direct, Trebor, Gala, COI and
Jordans), some "international" (FedEx, Dyson, Coca-Cola, Dunhill,
Samsung and O2), but the approach we take and the principles we apply
are the same regardless of the geographic footprint:

We work with all the communications stakeholders to deliver upstream
integration.

We use close customer dialogue to identify the unmet or defining needs
of a market and then distil this learning into a concentrated brand
idea.

We then get Rooney Carruthers and his merry band of creatives to
translate this idea into a compelling and iconic visual narrative that
is utterly cohesive and indelibly branded.

The reason we believe in visual narrative has nothing to do with the
fact that images travel better than words (although, of course, they
inevitably do). It is because we think the role of advertising has
shifted irreversibly over the past decade - away from the skills of the
copywriter towards the skills of the art director.

This change is in part due to the volume of communication we now consume
and in part due to the way we consume it. In terms of volume, the human
mind has probably never been as crowded as it is today. We are besieged
by noise and chatter and the result is cognitive glut. Our only
available response is to become ever more ruthless at editing, ignoring
and filtering out the din of external messages. The Information Age has
turned us into cognitive misers.

In this context, what the universal communicators understand is that
no-one is listening any longer. The old communication models, which
depended on verbal storylines and linear, cognitive structures, are now
ill-equipped to deal with the modern media reality, where a glimpse or a
fleeting moment are the norm, as opposed to the standard (script-based)
gradations of 20, 30, 40 or 60 seconds.

This is not to disparage TV advertising, which can still be
indispensable, but it does mean that the medium will be increasingly
visual and ident-based. After all, if we include mobile phones and PCs
(not to mention transvision etc), most of the world's screens are on
mute most of the time.

Which brings us on to the way that technology (mobiles, SMS, MMS,
podcasts, blogs, voice-over-internet protocol, instant messaging,
multiscreen, multiroom, multichannel) has not just increased the volume
of information to be consumed, but also transformed the way we consume
it.

There was a time when advertising was one of the places we looked for
information. There weren't many other places to go. Search engines,
infomediaries, price comparers, aggregators and pattern-recognition
systems, as well as a far more brand-literate media, have created a
world of near-perfect information. We do not need ads to carry the
cognitive burden (and even if we did, they are far less objective than
third-party sources).

The primary task for above-the-line communication, therefore, is not to
impart information (or even to persuade) - it is to create an unmissable
and unmistakable identity in the mind of the prospect: an identity
capable of embodying and symbolising the core purpose and key values of
a brand.

This identity then forms the bridgehead for subsequent communication,
whether its role is to persuade, inform, involve or shock. Hence the
priority we give to upstream integration.

Great brands have always understood the importance of visual narrative -
this is how Guinness, Rolex, Coke, Levi's and Apple have earned their
iconic status over the decades, and this is how Gap, Nike, O2, Dyson and
Samsung are earning theirs now. Somehow, the less they say, the more we
seem to know about them.

Perhaps this is a true measure of an iconic brand - they always manage
to set themselves apart from the clutter and noise of the market,
editing what they say so we choose to find out more about them, in the
right place at the right time. If anything, we're left thinking we've
had too little, not too much.

Which brings us back to Rodwell's first law of eating, and the perils of
the local speciality. For those of you who are interested, there are, in
fact, two further laws: never eat anything that looks like sick and
never eat anything bigger than your head. Pizzas beware.